For years the IMLS has been offering grants for LIS research and the education of librarians not appreciably different the one announced today on the IMLS website, except that this year’s grant program (and last year’s?) is called the “Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Grant,” as though the grant were her idea or funded by … Read more Laura Bush appropriates title of IMLS grant for librarians
From the AP story: WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says. The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for … Read more FCC study on media ownership ordered destroyed
Really interesting reading about myspace at Valleywag: Myspace: The Business of Spam 2.0 (Exhaustive Edition). This article points out a number of things about myspace that I wish I had known about or noticed much earlier. For example, did you know that Tom Anderson (everybody’s friend Tom) didn’t create Myspace, but was hired for PR … Read more Myspace: the business of Spam 2.0
In a way I think it is unfortunate that this story is about Cuba, because being about Cuba means that a lot of people just aren’t going to want to hear it. But it is something that should be well understood. 10 journalists working for the Miami Herald and its Spanish-Language sister paper were discovered … Read more 10 Miami Herald journalists on US gov’t payroll
Kim Leeder at Envirolibrarian has a brief review of the 1997 book by David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, which says that the amount of information easily available to people ends up harming more than helping civic participation. It sounds like an interesting book; I wasn’t aware of it. Since that book Shenk … Read more Data Smog
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication passed a resolution against the Bush Administration’s anti-press policies yesterday in San Francisco, at it’s annual conference. The resolution says, “The relationship between the presidency and press has always been uneasy. This tension is both unavoidable and generally salutary: When each side conducts its duties with … Read more AEJMC anti-Bush resolution
Prior to Wednesday, the muqata’a was a large government building in Nablus, Palestine, originally built by the British in the 1920s and used until this week for civil government functions. It contained the archives of civil documents of the region, containing “hundreds of thousands of file cases and documents — birth and death certificates, identification … Read more Israel targets Nablus administrative records for destruction
A new FAIR Action Alert reports that FEMA security guards are blocking journalists from talking to Katrina victims in FEMA trailer parks. FAIR cites the original story from the Baton Rouge Advocate. The report says that FEMA guards told reporters that Katrina victims are “not allowed” to talk to the media, that they “do not … Read more Katrina victims muzzled
In a blog post on if:Book titled the myth of universal knowledge 2: hyper-nodes and one-way flows, Ben Vershbow reports on a set of interesting discussions about international information flows, specifically the dominance of Western cultural products (including print and digital texts) in international markets, and what it means.
Students of media consolidation and market censorship are well aware of the importance of small, independent and alternative publishers in providing balanced viewpoints in libraries. In our practice as librarians we know that there is an array of institutional challenges to learning about, acquiring and making available literature from these hidden corners of the publishing … Read more Resources for the Alternative Press
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, by Roy Rosenzweig, originally published in The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46, and republished on the web by The Center for History and New Media. This article discusses Wikipedia from an historian’s point of view, and provides … Read more Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past
The Wall Street Journal published an article on Monday claiming that science journals routinely manipulate impact factors by encouraging contributors to cite heavily prior articles from the same journals. (The link goes to a login-free copy of the article as found on the Stay Free! blog.) Now, I think it’s true that because many journals … Read more WSJ claims STM journals rig impact factors
Here is a bit of depressing but not surprising news. Kathleen de la Peña McCook was thrown off of the Higher Education Service Learning discussion list for addressing a bit of Bush administration disinformation. Dr. McCook is not some unhinged anarchist who goes around trying to stir up trouble on discussion lists. She is a … Read more Kathleen McCook thrown off HE-SL discussion list for addressing disinformation
I’ve put three articles from the latest issue of Progressive Librarian, issue 26, up on the web. They are: Towards Self-reflection in Librarianship: What is Praxis? by John J. Doherty The Context of the Information Behavior of Prison Inmates, by Diane K. Campbell REVIEW ESSAY: Adult Literacy Practice and Theories ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù the writings of George … Read more Three from Progressive Librarian 26
Library 2.0 is a powerful idea that finds itself in an awkward predicament. It is an idea that has emerged out of what amounts to a separate discourse within librarianship, that of younger, web-centric librarians who have often have a sense that they are remaking the profession from the ground up for the digital future … Read more The Central Problem of Library 2.0: Privacy
Here’s a riddle: What does the musical interval of a fifth have to do with discussions of multiple literacies, the millenials, and Marshall McLuhan’s predicted decline of print literacy and the corresponding rise of a more multi-sensory way of being, thinking, and judging? Answer: play the high note and followed by the low note of … Read more Print virtue and the ontology of the Bo-ring
Free Exchange on Campus, a coalition of academic and public interest groups formed in response to David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” initiative campaign, has just released a major report refuting Horowitz’s book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America. The coalition’s researchers introduce the report… After conducting interviews with the professors in … Read more “Facts Count”: Examination of David Horowitz’s Dangerous Academics book
Here’s a good article about the Bush administration’s habit of picking and choosing what science by gov’t agencies gets published and what doesn’t, according to its political litmus test. The Bush administration and its supporters are the biggest users of the word FREEDOM, pounding fists on tables when they say it and saying it loud, … Read more Bush & Co. Censorship of Science It Doesn’t Like
Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, edited by Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva and just coming out from The New Press, is about a range of new and subtle forms of censorship of artistic expression. I’m excited about this book and expect to be of special interest to librarians.
In some back-and-forth with Rick Anderson in the comments on my posting about him from March 14th, I recommended three articles from Progressive Librarian that I think illustrate how the Progressive Librarians Guild represents a counter-trend in opposition to what he has been up to. It occurs to me that those three articles also relate … Read more Three articles for thinking about tech